First Gathering: The Party, the Coven and Beyond
Professor Daulton presided over his Intro Statistics class with the authoritarian determination of a minor deity. He knew his students hated the class and hated him, but they would learn something, damnit! As they had actually stayed awake for the entire class (a first), he decided to reward them…by letting them out five WHOLE minutes early.
“Class dismissed,” he magnanimously declared. “Happy Halloween.”
The entire class let out a collective sigh of relief. Chris rose from his seat and felt his joints creak. After sitting through stat, his limbs felt like cement. It might have been Halloween, but the class was as dull as ever. That half of the people in it were costumed lent the situation sad irony.
Fortunately for Chris, it was the final class of the day. As he walked back to the dorms, his thoughts turned to the party. Unlike many of his peers (Chuck, for instance), his interest was not in boosting his reputation or having some sleazy fling with a girl whose name he wouldn’t remember the next day. He actually did want to have fun, and for him that meant being there with friends: namely Ryan and Ashley and Stacy.
“Hey Chris,” Christine greeted. She had painted whiskers on her face and wore a hat with cat’s ears.
“Whatever it is,” he told her. “I’m not interested.”
“I was only going to say Happy Halloween.”
“Oh. Same to you.”
As she turned and walked away Chris noticed that someone had placed a sign marked PUSSY on her posterior. He thought of telling her but decided against it.
“That’s just mean,” said Ashley.
“But funny,” Stacy added.
“Poor Christine. Someone ought to tell her.”
“Eh…. she’ll figure it out eventually. What are you up to, Chris?”
He stretched. “Just got out of stat.”
“Yuck.”
“Are you going to the party later?”
Ashley raised her hand. “I am.”
“I’m not,” said Stacy.
Chris looked at her skeptically, trying in vain to mask his disappointment.
“Just somewhere else I have to be,” she explained.
“Gotcha.”
“But hey…. maybe I should wear a costume anyway.”
“Yeah,” Ashley teased. “Then someone will put a sign on your butt.”
“Cya later,” Chris said, retreating to his room.
“She’s not coming,” he confided to Ryan.
“Well…. like Matt said….”
“Forget what he said, man. I want HER.”
“Then tell HER. Or, get over it for the time being. I mean….no offense, but you aren’t doing yourself any favors by waiting around like this.”
“I know,” he confessed. “You going in costume?”
“Yeah,” Ryan replied. “Guy who can’t believe he’s going to DC.”
“Still not over that, huh?”
“What about you?”
Chris grinned. “I think I’m gonna dress up like Matt.”
“Matt?”
“Yeah. Might as well have some fun with this. Besides, he’ll get a kick out of it.”
“Or he’ll get angry.”
“Whatever.”
Chris was able to get a hold of a blue bandana and wrapped it around his head. He also donned a black shirt, turned inside out and a pair of soccer shorts. Despite being shorter and less bulky, the resemblance was more than just passing.
“Hey Matt,” Chuck greeted. “Wait a second…Chris?”
“Yup.”
“Holy Pants! Matt’s gonna urinate his pants when he sees this. I wish I had thought of that.”
Chris shrugged. He could only hope that the costume would cause as much of a stir when it counted.
The frat houses were located just behind a wooded area that marked the campus’s northern border. Matt urged everyone to take the long way and follow the road and not try to walk through the woods.
“Believe me,” he said. “It’s really easy to get lost in there. Of course, everyone thinks it will never happen to them. But every year, without fail, some asshole ends up staggering around in the dark at 3 AM. I should know: I was that asshole during freshman year.”
Chris took the advice to heart. He and Ryan and Ashley and a few others set out for the party together and they did in fact take the long way. Ashley had adorned a vamp/hooker costume and Ryan could not keep his eyes off of her.
“That’s a disaster waiting to happen,” Chris whispered to himself.
As it turned out, his costume failed to make much of an impact at all. Matt got a good laugh and a few people commented but most were content to leave him alone. Chris initiated a few interactions and drank a little, but he failed to generate any worthwhile conversations. When it became evident that he was having a lousy time and wasn’t going to score, he decided to quit the scene.
Despondent, Chris left the party, walked past the main road and journeyed into the woods. By the time he realized where he was, he was well on his way to getting lost.
“oh,” he mumbled. “I just joined the asshole club.”
Concluding that walking in the same direction would eventually lead him SOMEWHERE, Chris proceeded at a slow but steady pace. He wondered if Ryan and Ashley were getting it on at the party. He wondered if Chuck had succeeded in upping his rep. He wondered what in the hell Stacy was up to.
In the distance, Chris heard voices. It sounded like some people were having a party of their own. Curiosity compelled him and he abruptly turned to the right. The voices grew louder. He saw brightness. Brightness and dancing.
“Wait a minute,” he told himself. “I didn’t have that much to drink.”
There was a small fire and about a dozen or so people gathered around it. All were in costume. He couldn’t recognize anyone, but they looked to be having a good time. And there was no charge at the door (because there was no door).
“Hey,” he called as he approached. “Mind if I join in?”
Masked faces turned to him and solemnly froze in place. It was if they cast their collective gaze upon a gargoyle. Chris began to wonder exactly what kind of party was going on here. Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea for him to crash it. He began to slowly step away.
Suddenly, half a dozen hands emerged from the darkness and fell upon him. They seized him and dragged him to the ground. A sock was crammed in his mouth and a hood was thrown over his head. As he struggled to gain comprehension, he felt his shorts being tugged down.
“Nyumph!” he grunted. What was going on here? What were they going to do to him?
His masked captors were silent no longer. Their voices, all female, joined together in a chant.
“By will of the Great Spirit
Our mother, the sky
Remove the evil
From this one’s fly
Return him to innocence
Remove him from pain
Let not his curseful lust
Harm us again
Let it be said and let is be so
As the Four Winds Scatter
Let us now go”

Chris flinched. The hands that had held him left his body. He removed the hood from his head and spit out the sock. Anxious, he looked around: the masked women, the fire…. they were all gone. He was alone in the woods with his shorts down and without the slightest clue what just happened. Gazing at the night’s full moon, he began to scream.

Chris’s Dilemma
“…aaaaaah……”
“Chris!” Ryan snapped.
Slowly his eyes opened. He was lost in the darkness once more. This time, however, it was the much more familiar darkness of his room.
“Wha?” he asked groggily.
“You’re having a nightmare, man.”
Chris yawned. Nightmare? Then it didn’t actually happen? And yet, he couldn’t remember finding his way back to the dorm.
“Sorry.”
“It’s OK,” Ryan said. “I should probably be up anyway.”
“What time is it?”
“7:30.”
Chris nodded. No use going back to sleep. He yawned, stretched…and felt something terribly wrong. Ryan flicked on the lights and Chris looked around in disbelief. His sheets were drenched in urine.
“Oh!” he exclaimed.
“What?” Ryan asked.
“Nothing.”
“No, what?”
Chris sighed and shook his head. “If you tell anyone about this…you’re gonna wish you stayed in DC.”
“OK, I get the idea.”
“I wet my bed.”
“What?!”
“See for yourself.”
“I don’t need to,” Ryan remarked. “I can smell it. Ugh…dude…”
“Look, this has never happened before. I don’t know what….”
“Take it easy. It’s probably the nightmare you had.”
“Yeah.”
“Must have been one hell of a nightmare. What was it about?”
Chris shrugged. “I couldn’t even begin to tell you.”
“OK, well….hit the shower, do some laundry, get some air freshener going in here….no biggie.”
“Yeah. I don’t believe this!”
“Hey,” Ryan cautioned. “That’s my line.”
Chris showered and got dressed and Ryan doused the room with air freshener. He used so much, in fact, that they both began to cough and had to thrust open a window.
“Gah….what’d you use?” Chris complained. “It smells like a forest in here.”
“Better than the alternative,” Ryan replied, taking a big gulp of air from the window.
Chris stripped the sheets from his bed. When it came time to wash them, however, he hit a stumbling block.
“Oh. Out of quarters.”
“Don’t look at me, man,” Ryan told him apologetically. “I ran out a week ago. Luckily, I get to go home for a bit before going to DC. I still…”
“….can’t believe it. Yeah, I know. I’ll go ask around.”
“It’s still early,” Ryan reminded him. “And it’s a Saturday and people were partying last night. Nobody’s gonna be up right now.”
“You’re right. Speaking of last night….”
“No, I didn’t. Ashley didn’t either. And Chuck got really hammered.”
“Maybe I shouldn’t have left early. What else did I miss?”
“Christine. If you thought Chuck could get bad, you should have seen her.”
Chris’s jaw dropped. “Christine?! What? What’d she do?”
“Oh man…. what DIDN’T she do. Let’s put it this way…. the next time she asks me to go to a dumb program, there’s no way that I can say no. Not after seeing that.”
“Damnit!” Chris snapped. His night had been a total washout: he left the party before it got good, got lost in the woods, may or may not have been molested by a gang of masked females and woke up in a wet bed. He was disheartened to say the least. “I’m getting some breakfast. Later, man.”
When Chris returned from having eaten, he found Ryan packing up some things.
“Get quarters?” he asked.
Chris nodded. “When are you going?”
“My parents should be here in about an hour. It sucks how they don’t let us have cars.”
“Yeah. Well…there’s next year.”
“Do me a favor and keep me posted while I’m away,” Ryan asked. “I’m gonna call back a few times.”
“No problem,” Chris replied. He then turned his attention to the bundle of wet sheets. “I should probably take care of these.”
“I’d hold off on that if I were you,” Ryan suggested.
“Why? So they can ferment and grow mold?”
“No. Look at your pants.”
“My pants?” Chris glanced downward and was shocked to discover that his pants were wet.
“Oh man…this is starting to freak me out!”
“Maybe,” Ryan said uneasily. “You came down with something. You know, got sick. A virus maybe….I dunno.”
“Yeah,” Chris said doubtfully. “That’s probably it.”
For the second time that day, he changed clothes and hit the showers. His thoughts turned back to his encounter in the woods, which he could only vaguely recall. There was dancing…. he approached…. they grabbed him and whispered some weird mumbo-jumbo that he couldn’t remember and then it was over. He must have wandered through the woods and eventually found his way home. But why couldn’t he remember any of it?
Chris wished Ryan good luck on his DC trip and they parted company. Alone, he was left to deal with the mystery of his sudden loss of bladder control. It didn’t make any sense. If he didn’t know better, he’d swear a curse had been placed on him.
There was a knocking on the door and Chris opened it slightly. Chuck forced it open the rest of the way and wrinkled his nose in disgust. The air freshener had merged with the scent of urine to form a potent uberstench.
“Dude, it reeks in here,” Chuck complained. “Open a window!”
Chris pointed to the wide-open window and the gust of wind emanating from it.
“I…uh…. got pretty loaded last night…” he fibbed. He knew it would sound more plausible if he wet his bed because he was drunk than if he wet his bed because he was cursed.
“S’aright,” Chuck said. “Happens to the best of us. But if you think you had it bad…you aren’t gonna believe what happened with Christine.”
“Oh yeah….”
While he listened to the Christine story (she had, at some point, become convinced that she actually was a cat), he became aware that the problems with his bladder were far from over. Every so often, he would stare down at his pants to make sure they were still dry.
“What do you keep doing that for?” Chuck asked.
“Doing what?” Chris replied.
“Staring at your dick. You afraid its gonna fall off?”
“No.”
“You’re weird, man.”
“Whatever.”
“Look…the thing I came over here to tell you about was that I heard there was a rumor that a bunch of girls were holding some kind of witchcraft session in the woods. You hear anything about that?”
“No,” Chris lied.
“Probably lies anyway. Later, man. And open a window!”
“It IS open, you asshole,” Chris muttered as he left.
Chris spent much of the remainder of the day in agony. His attempts to do homework and watch a movie were punctuated by constantly checking his crotch and running to the bathroom. Even despite his best attempts to prevent it, leakage occurred. After donning his third pair of underwear, Chris contemplated simply giving up. If he really was cursed (which he still denied), then what was the point of fighting it?
Acceptance, Denial and Candycane Underpants
“They should really have a timer,” the girl remarked.
Chris nodded. They had both been standing in front of the washer in the laundry room watching their clothes tumble ’round and ’round. According to the dial on the machine, the final spin cycle had already ended. Why then did his clothes continue to spin? Was there a spin cycle beyond final spin? Chris was reminded of Nigel Tufnel’s now-famous declaration in This Is Spinal Tap: this amp goes up to eleven! So did this washer, apparently.
Eventually, the madness ceased with a deafening buzz of finality and Chris made the transfer from the washer to the dryer.
“No timer on these either,” he remarked as he stared into the odious dial.
“Yeah, but you figure it takes about an hour. I’m Pam, by the way.”
“Chris.”
“Nice to meet you. Be back in an hour.”
And with that, she disappeared. Chris wondered why, with all the vandalism that occurred on campus, there weren’t more thefts of clothes. After all, nobody stayed around to guard their laundry – not even him.
His solution to quell his bout of uncontrollable wetting was a simple one: for the rest of the day, he simply wouldn’t eat or drink anything. So far, it had worked. His stomach was rumbling like Warren Sapp dancing in the end zone, his throat was dry and he was starting to feel lightheaded but at least he had not suffered the indignity of wetting himself. Victory would be his…haha.
When Chris returned to the laundry room to retrieve his clothes, he found Pam leaning halfway into a dryer, her denim-clad ass on display. He thought back to Christine and the PUSSY sign and suddenly had a good idea of how that had happened.
“Lose something?” he asked.
“A sock…I think. They always seem to get away from me.”
“Hope you find it.”
He opened the door to the dryer and his clothes came tumbling out at him at high speed.
“What the…”
“You didn’t wait for final buzz, did you?” Pam asked.
Chris threw his hands up in defeat. “That’s it!” he exclaimed. “I’m through with this laundry crap…can’t I just pay you to do it for me?”
Pam giggled. “Sure…if you want me losing your socks too.”
Chris picked his clothes up off the ground and crammed them into his laundry bag.
“Bye Chris,” she said as he exited.
“Cya.”
Nice girl, he thought. Almost enough to make him forget how much he wanted Stacy – and how unlikely it was that he would have her.
Ignoring the rumblings of his stomach, Chris went about putting away laundry. His room had yet to entirely air out and he cursed Ryan for using that horrible air freshener.
“There,” he said once he had finished. “And now to…”
There was nothing to do. Chris opened the door and stepped out into the hallway. It was curiously empty. He had to remind himself that it was a Saturday and people often went home on the weekends. Shrugging, he decided to see if there was anyone around on the floor above him.
He ran into Stacy on the staircase.
“Hiya,” she greeted.
“Hey.”
“Where are you off to?”
“Nowhere. Just going to see what the guys upstairs are up to.”
“Oh. No one’s really around.”
“No one?”
“Not that I saw. Everyone’s either out or went home for the weekend. I’m totally bored.”
“Yeah…so am I.”
“Good. So then you can keep me company.”
Chris nodded. He wasn’t going to argue that.
Stacy’s room, Chris thought, is what a girl’s room should be like. There were posters of guys on the wall and distinctly feminine sheets on the beds, but it was otherwise the same as his. Contrastingly, the rooms of some of the other girls on the floor bore great resemblances to hostile alien environments. He told her of his laundry mishaps while she sat crosslegged on a beanbag chair and laughed at his plight.
“Yeah…. I definitely need to do laundry,” she remarked. “I’m down to wearing the dorkiest clothes ever.”
Chris glanced at her skeptically. She had on faded jeans and a sweatshirt.
“Well…” she said, blushing. “It’s more what I have on underneath.”
“Underneath?”
“If you can keep it a secret, you can see for yourself.”
Chris made a gesture of zipping his lips and Stacy lifted her shirt and showed him the top of her panties. They were white with a design of teddy bears holding candycanes. Instinctively, he began to chuckle.
“Shush!” she complained, giggling herself. “I saw them on sale a year or two ago and thought they were cute. Little did I know they’d make me look like I’m six.”
“You don’t look like you’re six,” he told her.
“I’m very short and I have candycane panties,” she replied. “Alls I’m missing is an imaginary pony and a pretty pink bow.”
“Well, you know what I think…” he began. That was as far as he got before he collapsed from the chair to the floor.
“Ohmygod are you OK?!” Stacy exclaimed, rushing to his aide.
“Ow,” he grumbled. “Yeah…I think so. I…”
He tried to get back up and fell down again. Stacy supported his arm and helped him on to Ashley’s bed.
“What happened?” she asked.
“I haven’t had anything to eat or drink since breakfast,” he explained.
“Why?”
“Because…I…. wasn’t feeling well.”
“Oh. Diaherria?”
Chris blushed. “No.”
“Because if it is, you should still try to at least drink water. Crackers wouldn’t kill you either.”
“It’s not diaherria,” he replied.
“It’s OK to admit that it is,” she told him. “I mean….who doesn’t get diaherria?”
“It’s worse.”
“Worse than diaherria?”
“Would you please stop saying diaherria?!”
“Oh. Sorry. So…what is it?”
He cleared his throat. “Can you keep a secret?”
“Hey…I showed you my panties, didn’t I?”
He nodded. “I…er…wet myself.”
“Wet your…. you mean like peed your pants?”
Solemnly, Chris nodded. Why did he have to open his big mouth? Now he’d never hear that end of this.
“I don’t get it,” she said. “That’s no reason to not eat.”
“It happened more than once,” he explained.
“Oh. Well…umm…”
“Look, it’s not like this is a normal thing for me,” he defended. “I had a nightmare. A freaky-ass nightmare. And when I woke up, my bed was wet and I’ve been creasing up ever since.”
“Wow,” Stacy gasped. Chris detected nervousness in her voice. “That must have been some nightmare.”
“It was,” he said. “Masked women dancing in the woods.”
“Come again?”
“I said it was about masked women dancing in the woods.”
Her face went pale.
“What?” he asked.
“Nothing,” she replied. “Stay right here, OK? I’m going to go get you some help.”
Chris nodded. He felt too lightheaded and weak to go anywhere anyway. Something about the way Stacy reacted, however, made him very suspicious. Could she have had anything to do with what was happening to him? No way. Unh-uh. They were friends…weren’t they? Or maybe he just didn’t want to believe otherwise.